The Wild Turkey Christmas
(no, not that kind of Wild Turkey)

This column really should have run in November, for Thanksgiving, but I didn’t get it written until the November issue had gone to bed, so I wound up rewriting half the first page to make it work for Christmas.  Fortunately it does, because Christmas has turkeys for dinner as well (no, NOT Cousin Durward; I mean the kind with feathers).  Also, there aren’t a lot of dishes you can work up to tie into Veterans’ Day, except maybe K-ration Spam à la Foxhole, and that’s not too exciting.

OK.  Last year’s holidays weren’t anything to write home about; I just wasn’t up for it, but for a couple of years before that it was something special.  The turkey for those years was not your every go-down-to-the-Safeway Butterball standard or even an organic free-range turkey from Whole Foods, it was a wild turkey that I shot on my grandmother’s place.  I don’t want to get into the eternal debate about “is the wild turkey really that smart, or is the hunter selling himself an excuse for being too keyed up to hit a barn door.”  I believe a little of both can come into it, if you don’t come home with a bird.  I will say, though, that it helps if you have a game warden who’s either on the other end of the county or is willing to exercise a little judicious blindness when it comes to property owners shooting on their own land.  Season on hen turkeys is always closed in Texas, and the toms I shot sure had awful short beards.  (In turkeys, as in humans, long whiskers are a male prerogative.)

The other thing I’m not about to do is to explain how to dress a freshly-shot turkey.  I do know how, and I’ve done it.  It’s messy, bloody, and involves throwing turkey innards over the back lot fence so the local varmints will come along and carry them off.  (Which presumes you have local varmints.)  Also, it can cause family disagreements; the first time I cleaned a bird myself, I didn’t know my father and stepmother had made a bet on whether I was too fastidious to do the job.  My stepmother lost $10 over that, and got hoorawed for half an hour afterward.

Anyhow, this month’s recipe is one for the adventurers in the kitchen.  I got it from Gourmet magazine a couple of years back, and it will work very well for a wild bird as long as you remember this:  WILD TURKEY IS A LEAN FOWL.  He is much leaner than a Frank Perdue oil-and-salt-water-injected carcass.  And that means you have to baste him more often and take other preventive measures to make sure you don’t wind up with a dried-out chip.

My recipe is pretty good at heading off a dried-out bird, but keep an eye on him anway and baste more if it starts to look dull on the surface.  I will tell you, though, it ain’t cheap.  Last time I did this one, fresh shiitake at Whole Foods were going for $11.99 a pound!  (Fifteen years and better availability has improved that; fresh shiitake at Central Market are $9.99 a pound in 2004.)  You can use dried or canned exotic mushrooms like oyster or abalone mushrooms also; the canned are far less expensive and work equally well.

ROAST TURKEY WITH OYSTER AND SHIITAKE SAUCE

Cook the bacon for two minutes, then drain and chop it.  Chop the leek, onion, and celery.  Stem the mushrooms and set the stems aside.  Line a baking sheet (or roasting pan, if you’re nervous) with foil and then buttered kitchen parchment.  Place the turkey in the center and surround with the bacon, leek, onion, celery and mushroom stems.  Add the butter and stock, and pour the wine over all.  Cover with more buttered parchment and foil, folding the edges to seal tightly.  Heat the oven to 300° F.  Roast the turkey to an internal temperature of 140° F. or, if you go by the clock, fifteen minutes a pound for a bird under sixteen pounds and twelve minutes per pound for birds over sixteen pounds.

SAUCE:  Mince the shallot.  Sauté the shallot in a large frying pan in butter over low heat for two or three minutes.  Add the mushrooms, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, about five minutes.  Shuck the oysters (if they aren’t already) and save their liquor.  Simmer the cream over medium low heat until the volume is reduced by about half.  Remove the turkey from the oven.  Drain a quarter cup of the roasting juice and set aside.  Add the oyster liquor, roasting juice, and cream to the mushrooms and simmer for ten minutes.  Add the oysters and cook until they begin to curl around the edges (about two minutes).  Season to taste.  Remove the turkey from the foil and discard the rest of the ingredients.  This will serve a large number of people—anywhere from eight to fifteen, depending on how big the turkey is.

Now the other thing we can’t do without at Thanksgiving is cranberry sauce.  I am not going to help referee the fight over jellied or chunks; that’s like fighting over what kind of peanut butter to buy.  Everybody here appears to like the chunky kind, and that’s what this recipe is.  It’s not near as sweet as the commercial stuff, and has some bite.  My recommendation for it is that until I tried it, I didn’t like anything about cranberries.  It’s one of my wife’s infrequent contributions in the kitchen; she got it from her mother, who got it from somebody, who got it from somebody, and so on back to the Pilgrim Fathers, who got it from the Indians, I guess.  It has the added virtue of being very simple.  Do it up the night before, so everything has time to go together properly.

GINGER CRANBERRIES

Rinse and pick over the cranberries.  Run them and the orange through the coarsest blade of a sausage grinder together, then mix with all the other ingredients.  Chill overnight before serving.

I don’t recommend doing this with a food processor at all; it loses the chunky texture if you do.  I even wound up going out and buying a good sausage grinder to do this with, and then discovered I could also make my own sausage (but that’s another column and another month).

Okay.  You got your turkey, you got your cranberry sauce, everything else you’re on your own.  Call your mother if you get stuck.  She makes better mashed potatoes than you do, anyway.  Invite her to dinner at your place.  She can bring the mashed potatoes.

first ran: December 1988

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Text ©1988 by Sam Waring. All rights reserved.
Created: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 at 21:26:29 UTC